A table designed by the Parisian cabinetmaker Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann.CreditCreditBonhams

By Eve M. Kahn

May 21, 2015

The Toledo Museum of Art, while winnowing its holdings in storage, is selling furniture originally made for major arts patrons.

Last month, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago offered two dozen pieces that the museum deemed superfluous, including an 18th-century mahogany console that sold for $37,500. That gilt-trimmed console has been attributed over the years to various Parisian workshops with royal clientele, and it has a twin at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It belonged to branches of the Rothschild family, and during World War II it was briefly in Nazi hands.

On June 11 in Manhattan, Bonhams will divide a set of Art Deco chairs and tables from the Toledo museum into six lots (with estimates from $50,000 to $180,000 each). The Parisian cabinetmaker Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann designed them in the 1920s for a perfume and cosmetics store near the Louvre. Subtle volutes, dentils and ribs carved into the ebony surfaces would most likely have impressed shop customers sitting around the tables, but for museumgoers at a distance from the glossy wood, those details were scarcely visible.

Jutta-Annette Page, the Toledo museum’s glass and decorative arts curator, described the Bonhams lots as “relatively simple,” adding that the museum would prefer to acquire an ivory inlaid Ruhlmann work that “really expresses his great virtuosity with materials.”

That piece would join some replacements for objects sold through Hindman. Where a pair of fairly generic 18th-century bronze light fixtures had hung, the museum has installed a crystal chandelier with spiraling arms made in Berlin around 1810 for Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother. The museum bought it privately for an undisclosed amount. (An identical chandelier made for Jerome Bonaparte sold for about $140,000 at an auction in Berlin last year.) The Hindman lots, Ms. Hindman wrote in an email, have gone to dealers and collectors rather than institutions.

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A folk-art statue of a tattooed woman in a bikini sold for $28,290 at auction last year.CreditSkinner

SERIOUS ABOUT TATTOOS

Tattoos, particularly the modern iterations of the form, keep rising in esteem among historians, curators and collectors. An exhibition of Japanese tattooing traditions opens next Friday at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and tattoos are the subject of surveys this summer at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Museum for Art and Industry in Hamburg, Germany. Those shows include designs as well as photos, sculptures, books, tools and even skin samples.

Tattoo variations over the last few millenniums are now being “treated as a serious subject rather than just something that has a naughtiness about it,” said Nicholas Thomas, an editor of “Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West,” published by Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.

That book’s essays cover seemingly improbable subjects, like the writer Leo Tolstoy’s fascination with a cousin covered in Polynesian tattoos and the popularity of American eagle tattoos (above the groin) among Samoans in the 1950s. Mr. Thomas said the interest partly stems from the current wave of extreme cosmetic surgery and fitness regimens.

The show will explore, among other areas, tattooed soldiers, criminals, monks and circus performers.

“It’s an incredibly diverse human practice that has much deeper historical roots than people expect,” Ms. Friedman said.

Derin Bray, an antiques dealer in New Hampshire, has begun collecting tattoo artifacts like sideshow banners and shop signs. At an auction last year in Marlborough, Mass., Maine Antique Digest reported, Mr. Bray was among the bidders on a folk art statue of a tattooed woman in a bikini. (The sculpture was eventually sold to David Wheatcroft, a dealer in Massachusetts, for $28,290.)

In the next year, Mr. Bray will write and lecture for the Piscataqua Decorative Arts Society about tattoo practices among seafarers in Portsmouth, N.H. He wrote in an email that he has another tattoo study in progress, but it “still has a few hurdles to get over before I can start talking about it.”

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Typewriters make a comeback in an exhibition in Los Angeles and in a book coming out in November.CreditRichard Polt

PASSION FOR TYPEWRITERS

Steve Soboroff is president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, but in his free time he hunts for typewriters that belonged to famous and notorious people. Two dozen of his machines are on display at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles through the end of this month.

When they are shown together in galleries or at his home, he said, “there’s a synergy in them, there’s an aura.”

The previous owners include a long list of writers (Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Ray Bradbury) and performers (Julie Andrews, Bing Crosby, John Lennon), the physician Jack Kevorkian, and Ted Kaczynski, who is said to have adapted typewriter parts into mechanisms for explosives. Mr. Soboroff, who has paid up to five figures for some of the machines, said he has found artifacts tucked inside some of them. In Hemingway’s typewriter, he said, shiny strips that looked like bacon turned out to be negatives of family photos.

Persuading relatives to relinquish machines can take years. “You have to cultivate the relationships,” he said. A typewriter used by John Cheever is en route to him, he said, but there are ones that got away, including typewriters that belonged to Lewis Carroll and Walter Cronkite. Computers of the famous, however, do not interest him. “I’ve really stuck to the low-tech, high-thought machines,” he said.

This fall he plans to lend a typewriter used by Jerry Siegel, a creator of Superman, to the New-York Historical Society for its exhibition “Superheroes in Gotham,” opening in October. A book being released in November, “The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century” (Countryman PressCountryman Press/W. W. Norton), by Richard Polt, a professor of philosophy at Xavier University, notes the favorite brands of celebrity typists. Sylvia Plath and Leonard Cohen preferred Olivetti’s lightweight Lettera 22; their typical texts were on the morbid side, Mr. Polt writes in the book, “but you’re allowed to type happy thoughts on yours.”

Mr. Polt owns about 320 machines, some manufactured in the 1870s. When new acquisitions arrive, he said, “I love spending hours cleaning them, testing them, figuring out how everything works, researching them and ultimately writing about them.” He added, “It’s the kind of collectible that has many dimensions.”

Correction:

A report in the Antiques column on Friday about the Toledo Museum of Art’s sale of some of its holdings in storage and replacements for some of those objects referred incorrectly to the sale of a chandelier made for Jérôme Bonaparte around 1810 that is at the museum. It was purchased privately by the museum for an undisclosed price, not for about $140,000 at an auction last year. (A copy of the chandelier made at the same time was sold at auction last year for that price.)